Sep. 29 (EUROPA PRESS) –
A court in Pakistan on Thursday acquitted the vice president of the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PLM-N), Maryam Nawaz, and her husband in a case of alleged corruption for which they were sentenced in 2018 by a court of first instance.
An anti-corruption court sentenced Nawaz to seven years in prison in 2018 for “allowing a crime” and not cooperating with the authorities, while her husband, Muhamad Safdar, was sentenced to two years in prison.
Nawaz was arrested in August 2019 while visiting her father, former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, in prison, who was also convicted of corruption, although she was later released on bail and appealed the sentence.
Nawaz Sharif’s daughter has applauded the verdict and has stressed that she “supports” her claims that she was not involved in corruption cases, according to the Pakistani newspaper ‘Dawn’.
Likewise, the current prime minister, Shehbaz Sharif -Maryam’s uncle- has said that the ruling “is a slap in the face of the so-called accountability system, used to act against the Sharif family”.
“The building of lies, defamation and slander has collapsed today,” Sharif said in a message on his Twitter account. “My congratulations to Maryam and Safdar”, he has settled.
The party has denounced on numerous occasions that the cases opened for corruption against its senior officials are part of a campaign of political revenge by the Army and the party previously in government, Pakistan Tehrik Insaf (PTI).
Sharif, a three-time prime minister, was removed from office by the Supreme Court in July 2017 for failing to disclose part of a salary received from his son’s company and was subsequently convicted in two separate cases for failing to disclose his sources of income. Both cases are still under appeal. He has been in prison since December 2018.
His brother, Shehbaz Sharif, took office in April after a no-confidence motion in Parliament against his predecessor, Imran Khan, who tried to prevent the vote by dissolving the body and calling early elections, a move overturned by the Supreme Court.
